Carts are used for a variety of purposes in retail environments. For example, consumers use shopping carts to store and transport items they wish to purchase as the shoppers move around a retail facility. Consumers may also use the shopping cart to load their items into their vehicle and often leave the shopping cart near that location, rather than return it to its designated area.
Additionally, retail personnel use stocking carts to replenish items on the store shelves, display units, and the like. To restock these items, retail personnel may manually push or pull around a stocking cart from a shipping area, warehouse, or storage section of the facility to a retail area. Due to the weight of the carts and the items loaded on the carts, retail personnel may be limited to moving a single cart at a time to replenish the items. This practice is inefficient, requiring the retail personnel to travel from the storage location to the display location several times to complete their task of restocking.
Vehicles and apparatuses have been developed for collecting and transporting a number of carts, especially in the context of shopping carts. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,168,367 discloses a shopping cart collection vehicle and method that involves an extendable boom attached to a lift truck to engage a number of nested shopping carts. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,902,188, 5,082,074, and 5,322,306 also disclose vehicles for conveying shopping carts, or trolleys. These designs, however, do not provide a quick, efficient, and reliable mechanism to retain the carts during transportation to a desired location. Also, because several of these designs rely on the carts to be nested to help retain the carts, these designs may not be helpful for transporting stocking carts that contain items or even empty carts that are not configured to be nested.
Therefore, it is an object of the invention to provide an apparatus and vehicle that overcomes these problems.